Physiological aging was associated with emotion recognition deficit. Neuroimaging studies have showed that decoding of emotional prosody cues is linked to a frontotemporal network involving superior temporal gyrus and inferior frontal gyrus. However, little is know about the relationship between affective prosodic processing and age-related change in the functional brain.

The present study aims to investigate the aging brain of early sensory processing of affective prosody.

Fifty-five healthy volunteers with an age-range between 18 and 75 years old underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging, with a mismatch paradigm, while they were presented with emotional prosodic stimuli. Thus, pseudowords spoken with positive and negative emotions were randomly presented among repeated non-emotional stimuli.

The results showed that automatically processing of changes in affective prosody involves bilateral superior temporal lobes. Furthermore, these brain areas were found to be influenced by the normal aging, i.e., advancing age is associated with reduced temporal lobe response.

Together, these findings suggest the involvement of temporal lobe in detection of emotion in language; and that normal aging affects its functioning.